About Blame
Post 170:
Blame. It’s a big part of life. It holds court through the miasma and the ataraxia, the good days and the bad. It’s always there at our fingertips. We have a latent desire to ascribe everything to something. Things don’t just happen.
Maybe. They say there’s a reason for it all, from the infinitesimal to the grand. It’s probably true, but how useful is that philosophy?
There is this thought. How about putting off the blame and the attribution, and just deal with the situation for what it is? It’s an idea, anyway.
This doesn’t mean don’t care or wall yourself off from post-game analysis. No doubt reflection has its place, but the present is all we have, and sometimes it gets subordinated by the blame game.
Trying to sum this up succinctly is a bit tricky. Let’s do a hypothetical.
Let’s say you’re a pilot. The sky is clear, the controls are true, but then, out of nowhere, your flight systems start to fail. The rudders are sloppy, the engine is sputtering, things are going from bad to worse, and there’s you in the air, the ground growing larger and more foreboding with every passing second.
In the moment, what’s best? There’s really only two options. You could wonder why, maybe blame yourself for not doing a proper pre-flight check, blame the plane, admonish yourself for a lack of preparation.
Or you could say screw it and focus on how to get down with your body parts in all the same places. Obviously, option two is more beneficial. Do what you have to do to shut out the future and the past and be totally and completely present. There’s certainly a reason why the situation is tits-up, but unless it’s wholly relevant to fixing the problem on the fly, do away with it.
There’s going to be some emergency landings, and even some crashes. A lot of life is like that. No matter. Focus on the now, leave the recriminations for later. They say any landing you can walk away from…
Okay. A not so subtle metaphor. I’ll take the blame.
Cheers. See you after.
